Communities in Action: Paul Rupp, President of HumanistsMN
HumanistsMN is one of AHA’s most active chapters. In many ways, their board is a model for humanist organizers nationwide. In this interview from late February, chapter president Paul Rupp speaks to the unique community fostered by HumanistsMN, and how it helps both new recruits and long-time members live their values during a uniquely challenging time for the Twin Cities community.
When did you first become involved with your chapter, and what motivated you to join?
My name is Paul Rupp, and I’m the president of HumanistsMN. I originally was just looking for community and people to connect with, and I went to an event. It was Brad Onishi speaking on Christian nationalism – he was way ahead of the curve back curve back in 2023. I met some of the people who were on the board. And ended up getting wrangled in by that group, and sort of have found myself falling forward into this position, I guess.
How big is your organization? Has it grown or shrunk over time?
We’re anywhere between 450 and 500.
Back around 2022, 2023, we had a big boom – there were quite a few people joining. Lots of new members during that period of time. The group had put up a billboard in the Twin Cities that said “Good without a God,” and I think that that resonated with a lot of people. We got some local attention from that, from the Star Tribune, as well as some national attention.
During that time we were just coming out of the part of COVID where people weren’t out and about as much. And I think coming out of that, people were just really desperately looking for other people to be in community with. I think people had spent years kind of doing some of the background work about thinking about what they believed, why they believed those types of things.
It seems like your chapter has a unique focus on action – when did it start, and why?
Yeah, I think a lot of it relates to whether you have people who are interested in doing. And honestly, whether you have people who are also kind of good at doing it. We have some people that are more visible, who are really good at connecting with people. We have some behind the scenes people who prefer not to be named.
There’s sort of two parts of it as I think about it. There’s the volunteerism side of things – activating our community when things are going on, especially here in Minnesota. That part of it is a little bit more reactive, and maybe at times a little bit more or less politically involved. Advocating for certain things that we care about as humanists.
So that’s one side of it. And then the other side of it is doing the volunteer pieces – getting out and making our communities a better place. Whether that’s through packing food for folks, making sure that people have clothes, providing bikes for children. We have members that are passionate about those things – who care about them, or have had food scarcity for themselves in the past and they can relate to that. Or just have prior connections to these groups. I think that’s a lot of the reason why we end up doing those things is ’cause we just have people who understand that at a personal level, and also it’s just something that interests them. When you’re like us and you’re all volunteers, a lot of times it takes people who are just really passionate about something.
What has your chapter been up to recently?
Last time we spoke, Renee Nicole Good had just died, and Alex Pretti had not yet been killed. We already knew things were bad in the state of Minnesota, and I think people were already reeling from that. We were still in some ways trying to figure out what we were gonna do, and where we could get involved.
That next week, Alex Pretti was killed. Myself and some of our other members really felt like there were a number of things that we needed to do. One of those things was just providing space for people who felt like they weren’t connected to a community, or felt they didn’t have people to talk to. So we had an event just for people to come and talk about what they were feeling in that moment.
In those sessions we talked with people who had some fear around what was going on, and had personal connections to it. We talked to people who just wanted to connect with other people, and they just didn’t have that anymore. So that was an event that I think was really meaningful.
And then one of the other people that was facilitating with me scheduled a follow-up session after that, saying ‘okay, so we’ve talked about how we’re feeling about this. How can you actually go and get involved now? How can you go and do some of the mutual aid things that you’ve been hearing about in the state of Minnesota? How can you get out and start supporting your community?’
Because that was what we heard a lot of – people were not only feeling pain that maybe they didn’t have people to talk to about what’s been going on, but I think a lot of people were saying ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to start.’ So one of our members, Audrey, just took that on. There was maybe a week in between those events, so they kind of just went hand in hand.
How is HumanistsMN “meeting the moment”? (intentionally open-ended)
The people of Minnesota have this very activating nature where we see an injustice in the world, we see something going on, and we tend to not just sit around and let the thing happen.
We tend to be a very compassionate community. That’s certainly not ubiquitously true. But it’s a big thing in the state of Minnesota – this networking and supporting our communities. I think people expect that when they join our group. It’s one of the biggest reasons why we do it. We have people that are interested in doing it, but also if we’re supporting the state of Minnesota, the people that join just expect it.
We hang out, we talk a little bit, we spend some time in community – but then we go and do something, because just sitting around doing nothing just doesn’t feel good to us.
One of the things that we’ve been doing is connecting more with groups like the food group here in Minnesota that’s doing a lot of mutual aid things. When you hear about food being brought to people who are afraid to leave their homes, these groups are the ones doing that. Supporting those groups is something that we’ve really felt can help people in this moment and can really improve people’s lives.So connecting our members to things like that has been really critical.
A lot of these connections go back years – a lot of humanists are already connected to some of these groups that are doing really important things. It’s just groups of people who wanna make their community a better place. When that is your main goal is to make people’s lives better. When you see people’s lives getting meaningfully worse in a very short period of time, you just don’t sit around and wait to do something about it. So a lot of these groups we’ve already been connected with for years. And we had those relationships built up to an extent.
When this started happening, some of these groups reached out and said, ‘Hey, we could actually use some more people – can you send more people?’ – and we’ve done that.
The best thing that you can do right now is to meet your neighbor. Talk to the groups that are already doing a lot of the critical work, get connected with them today. That’s one of the biggest things I would say to any humanist group in any of the states – get connected to those groups today. Whether that’s attending once a month, sending money…whatever it is. Getting connected to those groups today is better than getting connected to those groups tomorrow.
How do you envision the future of your chapter, and what resources will you need in order to get there?
We don’t necessarily need to continue thinking about growth. What we need to think about is sustainability.
When you’re an all-volunteer organization, you really have to decide where your resources are gonna go. And a lot of our resources had gone into growing and connecting with people, and I think that’s good. I’m not saying we don’t want new members, we do want that.
But what we really want is we have all of these members, right? These members have joined. These members pay dues. These members are looking for us to deliver something to them. That’s why they joined. That’s why they continue to support us. So we’re saying ‘what types of programming can we do? Can we do better programming? Can we do bigger programming? Can we do smaller programming but more frequently?’
I think that’s something that our group has done really well – being really nimble, and trying new things. That’s what’s been really connecting with people. Whether that’s a big forum for National Religious Freedom Day, or a smaller event like a board game night, or all of the volunteering.
And all of that takes somebody who cares and is interested in doing those things.
Right now it really feels like we have one person doing eight things. We have some of these really, really active volunteers doing a ton of stuff. So they’re saying they want to scale back a little bit. But that means that there’s certain things that we need people to pick up. And so what we’re trying to do is find those members within our organization – or who haven’t joined us yet – who are interested in doing things that really can bring a significant amount of fulfillment or meaning, drive our purpose towards getting involved in the things that bring that feeling of building community and being engaged in community.
Any parting wisdom?
One of the things that people really want desperately right now is a place that they can go to find meaning and purpose. Where they don’t necessarily have to buy into some really big belief structures or a specific central dogma, but where they feel like they can connect just as people. I think one of the best ways for us to do that is by building compassionate communities that are curious. I think those two things in combination really create a place where people feel safe, where they feel like they can meet other people who are like them.
I know for me, one of the biggest things is this idea of creating intergenerational spaces. Because for me, one of the biggest things I felt as I joined this organization was seeing people that are my parents or my grandparents’ age who have really progressive beliefs – beliefs that are much closer to my own. And seeing adults who have similar beliefs to me was such a game changer in my mind. Being able to learn from them has been really critical as well.